Literature and the History of Science

The invitation to contribute to the current issue was as follows:

The Spring 2003 German issue of Modern Language Notes will focus on "Literature and the History of Sciences." Contributions should pertain to aspects of what Shapin and Schaffer once termed "literary technology," meaning a facet of scientific work that exists in conjunction with technology proper and the procedures of social communication.¹ Such aspects include the following: techniques of reproduction and forms of knowledge (e.g., in writing, iconic representation, in technological apparatus and experimentation); communicative operations and truth values (e.g., secret knowledge and the scientific community, diaries and encyclopedias, correspondence and scientific journals); rhetorical devices and conditions of scientific validation (e.g., "visualization," "representation in mathematical or experimental terms," "disposition in experimentation," "observation," "testing").

Over the past fifteen years the field of "Science and Literature" has become increasingly prominent. The reason for this development can be located in complementary tendencies in literary studies and the history of sciences, tendencies that seemed to eventually converge or even to coincide methodologically. "Representation" was—and still is, however implicitly and skeptically—used as a key concept in these methods. Contributions to this topic do not necessarily have to connect a literary text and an epistemological theory or object, although the articles should be oriented toward the question of how "representation" can be determined in this context or, rather, whether "representation" is a sufficient category for this field at all.

Since the sixties of the last century—when Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) appeared in print and Hans Blumenberg published Paradigms for a Metaphorology (1960), when Jacques Derrida wrote his introduction to Husserl's History of Geometry (1962) and Michel Foucault wrote the Order of Things (1966)—a strong connection has emerged between the theory of meaning and the history of the sciences. Indeed, it may seem that since that time period all efforts to develop theories of meaning and communication that have become relevant in the humanities and in literary studies hark back to one of these studies on the history of scientific knowledge or the historicity of knowledge as science. If literature has to do with the question of what it takes to construct and what it means to maintain or not maintain meaning, since the 1960s we have been confronted with the origin and history of scientific knowledge as soon as we think about literature—and vice versa.

Today, there is good reason to address the question of "Science and Literature" and what may come after the concept of representations in a context where German and American authors are invited to meet and exchange their views. The American and German academias have seen remarkable, even if somewhat different, developments in the field during the last fifteen or twenty years. The tradition of exploring relations between "Science and Literature" on a thematic level as had already been the case for a long time in the history of ideas, was now going to be combined with the more structural interrelation between theories of meaning and the historicity of scientific knowledge.² Crucial to this development were tendencies in both fields. The history of the sciences turned from the inner development of concepts to questions of technology, institution, and modes of recording and conveying. Literary studies, on the other hand, adopted the method of questioning conceptual meaning in metaphorology, the analysis of discourse, or the general theory of the text in order to redefine the "quasi-institution" of literary writing. Whereas in the United States it was prominently historians of science who developed their fields of specialties into broader interrogations on culture and representation in general, in Germany the new interest in "Science and Literature" often emerged from the analysis of culture—"Kulturwissenschaft"—in the departments of literature and philosophy.³ Even if the different points of departure have become less and less important today—with literary studies turning toward history of science in the US and with the exemplary work of the Max...